Inclement Weather, Large Animals, and Other Strange Happenings Outside a Costco in New Jersey

Chapter 1

>"*I think they're watching us. I think they're judging us. I think you could type away on that fucking cell phone all night, kid, and it won't make one lick of difference by morning. There’s nobody the can help us. There’s nobody that can save us. This is God’s doing. You should know that, a good Catholic kid like you, God gets his due. God always gets his due.*"

>-Jake from the Seafood department.

My friend Marcus tried to leave the store today. A ten foot tall bear trotted out of the woods to knock him beneath the front wheel of a shopping cart and drag him away. I know that sounds insane. All of this sounds insane. But if somebody out there is reading this, and somehow, for some reason, knows anything useful about whatever is happening outside of Costco in Bayonne, NJ, I desperately need your help.

For context, my name is Daniel. I’m twenty-one years old and have worked at this location for six months in Electronics. Marcus handles produce. We spent most of today the same way everyone else did: bitching about the weather and looking busy in front of customers. Nothing remarkable there. This place is always chaos. Costco is not a store so much as a challenge issued to suburban families with bulk purchasing addictions. Saturday crowds in particular feel like being trapped in a giant fluorescent beehive. Carts screeching. Children howling. Deli samples vanishing in human swarms. The usual.

Then the storm rolled in.

Everybody noticed that part. Dark clouds moved over the lot around mid-morning so quickly it seemed like somebody threw a blanket over the sun. Rain started ten minutes later. Not normal rain. Sheets of it. The kind that make the windows look painted gray. Management made the standard announcements about taking care in the lot and slowing the cart retrievals. People grumbled and kept shopping because no New Jerseyan worth their salt turns around over weather.

The first weird thing happened around eleven.

We heard a crash outside the front entrance. Not a little parking lot tap. Something heavier. One of the front-end cashiers, Tiffany, screamed and everybody in that part of the store stopped at once. You know the sound a big room makes when all the human noise cuts out at the same time? It’s like a vacuum opens.

A bunch of us drifted toward the glass. I had the worst possible spot near the TV display wall, but I could still see enough through the crowd. The storm had darkened the lot and the rain came down so hard in places that it looked white. A red sedan sat sideways near the cart return with the entire front end folded around a light pole. No driver. No visible movement. Just the car and a scattering of carts rolling in the wind.

Then someone shouted,

“*What the hell is that?*”

There was a shape just beyond the edge of the lot where the little strip of woods separates Costco from the access road. At first I thought it was a guy in a poncho because of how the rain warped the outline. Then it moved. Four legs. Massive shoulders. Head low. The creature stepped out enough for all of us to really see it.

The first thing that came to mind was *bear.* The second was *that is not any bear I have ever seen.*

It had to stand at least ten feet at the shoulder if it reared fully. Maybe more. The fur looked too dark and too long, almost oily, and the body itself seemed wrong in proportion, with front limbs much too thick and a face that stretched longer than any black bear ought to. The thing nosed at the wrecked sedan once and then looked up toward the store. Toward us.

I know animals don’t really “stare” the way people do. But this one did. Every single person by the front glass felt it. The whole crowd leaned back as one body. Even through the rain, I got the clear and awful sensation that the thing recognized the people inside as separate from the cars and trees around us. We were not background. We were being observed.

Then Marcus, absolute moron that he is, said, “*I’m gonna go see if somebody’s in the car.*”

People laughed at first because of course they did. Marcus talks big all the time. But he started pushing toward the sliding doors. One of the shift managers, Kim, tried to stop him.

“*The hell you are. Security is on the phone with 911 right now.*”

“*What if somebody’s dying out there?*”

“*What if you are?*”

Good question, Kim.

Marcus shook her off and hit the door release before anyone could physically stop him. The outer doors slid open to a wall of wind and water. He got halfway to the cart bay before the bear moved.

Trotted is the word I used up top because I still don’t really know how else to describe the speed. There was no dramatic charge. No roar. The thing just crossed all that wet blacktop in a handful of ugly, fluid strides and clipped Marcus once with a paw that looked the size of a kitchen table. He disappeared under the carts in a burst of metal and flailing plastic. By the time anyone screamed, the bear had him by one leg and was already hauling him back toward the woods like a deer.

Marcus was alive long enough to grab at the pavement. I saw his hands. I saw his fingers leave bloody streaks between the yellow parking lines.

And then he was gone.

The doors slammed shut behind the weather. Half the people in the front of the store started crying. Another handful started shouting at once. Some customers wanted to barricade everything. Some wanted to leave immediately because apparently seeing a monster-bear take a coworker was not enough to discourage them from getting to their SUVs. One lady actually tried to complain about her frozen groceries.

Management herded us away from the windows and locked the front entrances. Cell service had already started going spotty from the storm. The overhead speakers crackled with one of the assistant managers trying to sound calm while clearly losing his mind. We were told to remain inside, await emergency response, and stay clear of the front glass. Nobody really listened. We all ended up clustering in little frightened groups throughout the store, glancing toward the entrance every few seconds and flinching every time the storm rattled the building.

The cops never came.

That part matters. We waited. We called. We refreshed weather reports and emergency alerts. Nothing. Roads still showed open on the state site. Nearby towns were under flash flood watches but nothing severe enough to explain total silence. Yet no sirens ever appeared in the lot. No animal control. No state police. No ambulances. Just rain.

By noon the power flickered. Backup systems kicked in, but half the overhead lights dimmed. The store took on this aquarium-like gloom. Shadows deepened in the aisles. People’s voices carried weirdly. Every big building has a slightly unsettling version of itself after the lights go half out. Costco under emergency power feels like shopping at the end of the world.

That was when Jake from Seafood started preaching.

Jake is one of those old South Jersey Catholic guys who still manages to look hungover inside a hairnet. Big belly. Broken nose. Voice like a lawnmower. Usually he’s funny in a dark sort of way. Today he looked pale and inspired.

“*You all saw it,*” he told whoever would listen near the bakery. “*That wasn’t natural. The storm ain't natural. This is punishment. Same as in the Old Testament.*”

A mother with three kids started crying harder when he said that.

Someone asked what exactly we were being punished for. Jake looked around the room and shrugged. “*Pick one. It’s Jersey.*”

Nobody laughed.

I drifted back toward Electronics mostly because standing under the giant TV wall made me feel like I still had a job to do. My phone buzzed in and out with texts that only half delivered. My mother asked if I was safe. I typed *I think so* and watched the message fail three times. Nearby, a teenage stocker named Luis tried to livestream the parking lot through the entrance glass. He said maybe if enough people saw it online, someone would come. The video wouldn’t upload. He swore and kept trying.

Around twelve thirty, the storm changed.

The rain did not stop. But something heavier started moving through it. Shapes. Not one. Multiple. We counted at least four oversized animals along the tree line before we gave up pretending they were normal wildlife. Another bear-like thing. Something with antlers too wide for its skull. A long gray body low to the ground that moved more like a cat than any cat should. They circled the edges of the lot without ever crossing directly into the open again.

Watching. Judging, like Jake said.

The real panic started when one of the customers near Home Goods shouted that there was water coming in under the rear emergency exit.

And that was only the beginning.

Chapter 2

[Part I](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/aio8f0/inclement_weather_large_animals_and_other_strange/)

'

January 12th, 11:35 AM.

"*We heard screaming.*"

"*I heard screaming.*"

"*Was there an accident?*"

"*Is everyone okay?*"

"*My husband went out there. Did you see him? Did you see him?*"

"*Well don't just stand there, asshole, we all heard a crash! People’s lives are on the line! Say something!*"

The word vomit combination of questions, comments, and accusations came in like an assault rifle from every direction at once. The customer service area had turned into a zoo. In any large emergency, especially one trapped indoors, you quickly learn that nobody wants answers so much as they want *their* specific answer first. That doesn't make them bad people. Fear just turns the brain into a blender. People started crowding the managers, the security desk, the front-end supervisors, anyone who looked remotely employed. Somebody demanded refunds. Somebody else demanded a weapon. One guy with a neck tattoo demanded both.

I stayed back by the television wall and watched the whole scene with my heart kicking around my ribcage like a trapped dog. Electronics put me high enough up in the store to see the entrance without being swallowed by the mob. A few employees clustered with me, mostly the younger ones, and together we stared past the panicked crowd and out into the gray soup of the parking lot.

Marcus never came back.

Nobody did.

Security, such as it was, amounted to one retired cop named Frank and a nineteen-year-old seasonal guard who looked about twelve. Frank had locked all visible exits and now stood beside the front doors with a radio clipped to his belt and the stiff, quiet look of a man revising his whole understanding of the world in real time. He kept glancing toward the tree line every few seconds. Every time he did, I followed his eyes. The oversized shapes still waited out there in the weather. They moved in and out of visibility depending on how thick the rain fell. Sometimes we saw one at a time. Sometimes three at once. They never approached the building. They just paced the boundary between asphalt and woods.

Jake from Seafood found me around noon. He smelled like brine and cigarettes and wore one blue rubber glove like a weird medical prop.

“*They're corralling us,*” he said without introduction.

“Great,” I answered. “Thanks, Jake.”

He jabbed a finger toward the windows. “*You don't got to be sarcastic to be smart, kid. You see what I see? They're not attacking the store. They’re keeping us in.*”

I wanted to dismiss him. I really did. But once he said it, I couldn’t unsee it. The creatures outside moved with intention. They patrolled. They shifted positions when groups of people got too close to the glass. A few times the long gray thing drifted near the loading dock just as employees back there started arguing about forcing the emergency exit. Every motion seemed responsive, almost measured.

“Maybe they’re just animals,” I said weakly.

Jake laughed. “*Yeah? Since when do animals do perimeter control?*”

Hard to argue with that.

By twelve fifteen the first major problem hit. Water reached the rear aisles.

Costco floors are wide and flat and badly designed for panic. Employees from Grocery came up front with reports of flooding near produce and paper goods. The storm drains outside must have failed because water had started pushing beneath a rear emergency exit and through part of the loading area. At first it spread in a thin reflective film. Then it deepened. By the time management reacted, the current had enough force to float a stray bag of dog food across the polished concrete.

Assistant manager Bill announced that all customers should move toward the center of the building and avoid the back wall. He tried to sound confident over the loudspeaker and instead sounded like a man reading his own obituary.

People obeyed about halfway.

Some headed inward. Others used the excuse to wander and gawk. A handful of idiots actually moved closer to the flood to record it on their phones. We live in a terrible age for survival instinct. A woman in a pink North Face kept saying, “*This is going to be all over Facebook.*” I remember thinking: *that assumes Facebook still exists outside this building.*

Cell service got worse by the minute. Texts hung unsent. Calls dropped the moment they connected. The store Wi-Fi vanished entirely. One guy claimed he had gotten through to 911 and been placed on hold, which sounded absurd enough to be true.

Then the screaming started in the back.

Not Marcus-level horror. Different. Human. Immediate. We all turned at once toward produce. A pair of employees came splashing up the center aisle, soaked to the knee, shouting over one another.

“*Something’s in the water!*”

“*I saw it!*”

“*Get everybody away from the back!*”

The crowd surged forward instead because of course it did. I got shoved half into a display of discounted batteries before I caught my balance and moved with the rest toward a better line of sight. Overhead lighting flickered again. The dimmer emergency strips gave the far end of the store a sickly, underwater look.

I reached a point near seasonal goods just in time to see Tiffany from Front-End dragged out of the flood.

Three employees had hold of her under the arms. She kicked and sobbed and kept trying to twist back toward the water as though she had dropped something important there. One of the managers slapped her twice before she focused enough to answer questions.

“*What happened?*”

“*What got you?*”

“*Did it bite you?*”

Tiffany kept shaking her head so hard her wet hair slapped her cheeks.

“*I saw something swimming next to me in the water. I don't care if you believe me. I saw its eyes.*”

That quote matters because of how much she insisted on it. Not *a shape*. Not *a thing brushed my leg*. She saw eyes. Looking *up* at her through the floodwater inside the store.

Nobody had time to unpack that because the back emergency exit slammed open. Not a little bump. Not wind. The door burst inward with a crash and a fresh sheet of muddy water tore through the produce section hard enough to knock over displays of oranges and avocados. Something large moved in the churn. People screamed and scattered in six different useless directions. For one dizzy second I thought one of the outside animals had gotten in.

It hadn’t.

What came through that door was stranger.

Imagine a deer, maybe, stretched and thinned and half-submerged. Long black shape. Slick hide. Antlers that forked too many times and scraped against the metal frame as it entered. The head stayed low in the water so all we really saw at first were the antlers and the eyes. The eyes sat too close together and shone with the pale reflective green of a cat. The thing did not run into the store so much as glide. The flood carried it a few feet inward before it found footing.

Then it stood.

Its front half rose taller than any deer ought to while the rear legs stayed bent in the water like those of a wading bird. People closest to it fled screaming into housewares. One old man slipped and disappeared beneath the current for several awful seconds before surfacing farther down aisle eight. The creature simply watched us. It cocked its head once, antlers dripping. Then it turned those green eyes toward the ceiling as if listening.

Jake stepped beside me and whispered, “*Told you. Judgment.*”

I could have punched him.

Instead I watched the thing open its mouth. No roar came out. No snort. Just the shrill electronic warble of a phone line trying to connect.

That sound broke everyone.

People ran. Real panic then. No more clumps, no more waiting for management, no more pretending somebody smarter would handle it. Families grabbed children. Employees vaulted pallet jacks. Carts toppled. Bill screamed into the microphone to keep calm and got drowned out by a thousand bad instincts all firing at once. The creature moved again, one long step at a time through the flood, still making that awful dial-up shriek from the hole where a normal mouth should have been.

Frank, the retired cop security guard, drew a revolver from under his windbreaker and fired twice. I had no idea he carried. Most of us didn’t. The reports echoed off the warehouse ceiling and sent a fresh wave of hysteria rippling through the crowd. One shot hit an antler and chipped off a dark shard. The other hit the thing somewhere in the upper torso with a sound like slapping wet carpet.

It didn’t react.

Frank looked more betrayed than frightened. He fired again. This time the creature dropped suddenly into the water and vanished under the churning brown surface. Not dead. Gone. The flood still rushed in. Produce bobbed past in weird little flotillas. But the thing itself had disappeared.

“*Get people upstairs!*” somebody shouted.

That would have been a good idea if Costco had an upstairs. It did not. We were in a concrete box filling slowly with water while impossible animals paced outside and something with antlers swam through the aisles. The thought hit everyone at roughly the same time. We had nowhere meaningful to retreat except deeper into the store.

By one o’clock, that was exactly where we all ended up.

Customers and employees packed themselves into dry islands between clothing, hardware, and electronics while the rear third of the warehouse continued to flood. We built little barricades out of pallets more for morale than effectiveness. Mothers cried. Kids asked too-loud questions no one wanted to answer. Jake continued his sermonizing to anybody trapped near seafood and somehow managed to sound even more convinced with each passing minute.

And over all of it, every now and then, faint and far off from somewhere in the building or outside it or under it, we kept hearing that same sound.

A phone trying to connect.

Chapter 3

[One](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/aio8f0/inclement_weather_large_animals_and_other_strange/) and [two.](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/ajc6rp/inclement_weather_large_animals_and_other_strange/)

>"*I saw something swimming next to me in the water. I don't care if you believe me. I saw its eyes.*"

>-Tiffany from Front-End.

3:30

The snow fell for hours.

We couldn't see the storm, anymore. The entrances and exits to Costco were blocked for safety reasons. But we could hear it. That goddamn storm beat against the side of the warehouse like waves against a ship. Every so often, a gust of wind howled through the loading dock seams and the whole building answered with a low metallic groan. The lot outside had disappeared behind white. Sometime after one, the rain must have switched over. We only figured that out when the windows at the front stopped looking wet and started looking blind.

The flooding in the back did not go away with the weather change. If anything, it got worse. Water still pushed in beneath the rear emergency exit and through whatever drainage system had failed under the loading area. It crept forward aisle by aisle, carrying fruit, cardboard, and the occasional abandoned shoe. The deer thing with the antlers had vanished, but nobody forgot it. We all kept watching the surface of the flood as if it might erupt again any second.

The practical problem became numbers.

There were too many people in the building and not enough calm. Management tried to split everyone into groups and station employees with each one. Good luck. Most customers didn't know where their spouses or kids had run during the first big panic. Some clung to the nearest person just to avoid being alone. Others insisted on trying doors every ten minutes. We set up a crude little command center near membership with bottled water, first-aid kits, and clipboards for names. It looked pathetic. It also looked like the best civilization could manage under fluorescent light while monsters circled outside.

I ended up with a cluster near Electronics because apparently the TVs made people feel safe. Maybe because the screens still worked on backup power. Most only showed static or error messages once the cable died, but one display kept flipping between weather radar and the internal security camera feed. That mattered later.

Jake wandered over around two with a box of frozen shrimp under one arm like he was carrying scripture. “*Need protein,*” he explained when I stared.

“Why are you carrying seafood around in an apocalypse?”

He looked offended. “*Because I know where it is and most of these morons don't. You want some or not?*”

I didn’t. He left the box with us anyway and then pointed at the screens. “*You see anything new, you tell me.*”

One of the cameras covered the rear receiving area near the loading docks. Security had pulled it onto the screen in case the flood reached the electrical room. For a long time the feed only showed water, floating boxes, and occasional shadows from swinging industrial doors. Then, at 2:17, something moved beneath the surface.

At first it looked like a person swimming underwater. Human shoulders. Human arms. Too graceful. It glided against the current and came to rest beneath a hanging chain near the dock door. The overhead floodlight washed just enough through the murk for us to see a face tilt upward.

Not a face. A woman’s shape where a face should have been. Pale hair spread out in the water like sea grass. Dark holes for eyes. Mouth open wider than physics should allow. She drifted there looking into the camera while people around me slowly realized what they were seeing. A little boy started crying. His mother covered his eyes too late.

The woman-thing smiled.

Then the security feed cut to static.

That was when Frank, the security guard, finally stopped pretending we were dealing with an animal emergency. He gathered the managers, a couple department leads, me, and somehow Jake in a semicircle near tires. His revolver stayed out in his hand now. Nobody objected.

“*We need to make decisions,*” Bill said, trying for leadership and landing closer to nausea. “*Food, water, where we’re keeping everybody, what to do if the back keeps filling—*”

Frank cut him off. “*What we do if something else gets inside.*”

Silence followed that.

Then Jake, of course, broke it. “*The answer is prayer. But if you don't like the answer, maybe guns.*”

Nobody laughed. Again.

Frank pointed at the hardware section. “*There’s axes. Machetes. Utility knives. We arm who we can trust and keep the rest of the customers away from the damn doors.*”

Bill looked horrified. “*You want us to hand out weapons to civilians?*”

“*I want us alive,*” Frank answered.

We compromised in the dumbest possible way: employees only. A small group of us got deputized with box cutters, camping hatchets, heavy flashlights, and two flare guns from automotive. The whole thing felt ridiculous until I wrapped my hand around a hatchet handle and immediately felt a tiny bit better. Primitive brain likes primitive solutions.

Then the chanting started.

Not everyone heard it at first. The store was too loud. Too many people talking, crying, asking for updates, demanding chargers, demanding answers, demanding miracles. But once the noise dipped, once everybody ran out of the same questions for a few minutes, the sound came through clear from somewhere beyond the front wall.

Voices. A lot of them. Distant and rhythmic.

At first I thought wind was making words out of the storm. Then one of the women near membership whispered, “Do you hear that?” and the whole room held still. The chanting came and went with the gusts. Not English as far as I could tell. More like the shape of a sermon heard through church doors from the parking lot. Low and organized and very much alive.

Jake crossed himself.

“*There it is,*” he said. “*Told you He'd send witnesses.*”

Frank ordered everyone away from the front windows. That only worked for about thirty seconds. Curiosity always beats common sense eventually. A knot of us, armed and stupid, crept toward the entrance and peered through the whiteness beyond the glass.

The parking lot had changed.

Snow covered most of the lines now. Carts lay overturned in drifts. The crashed red sedan looked half buried. And standing just beyond the nearest row of handicap spaces, maybe twenty or thirty yards from the doors, were people.

At least I thought they were people.

There had to be twenty of them. Maybe more. All wearing dark clothes. All standing perfectly still in the snow with heads bowed. Too far away for faces. Too still for comfort. The giant animal shapes still moved farther out along the lot and tree line, circling behind the crowd like shepherd dogs around a flock.

The chanting came from them.

One figure at the center raised its head. Even through the storm I could tell something was wrong with the face. Too pale. Too bright. It lifted one hand and pointed directly at the building.

Then every single head in the group turned toward the glass at once.

We fell back like idiots caught spying. Somebody behind me started praying out loud. Jake answered him with an “amen” so heartfelt it made me want to punch both of them.

Whatever thin thread held the store together snapped around three.

It started with the generator. The backup lights dipped once, twice, and then half the warehouse went dark. Panic rippled instantly through the crowd. People screamed. A child got lost. One of the managers yelled for everyone to stay put, which in emergencies always means “stampede if possible.” In the dim red emergency strips, Costco looked less like a store than a cave full of terrified animals.

Then something hit the roof.

Not rain. Not branches. Weight.

A heavy thud rolled above us from front to back. Then another. Then a scraping movement big enough to shower insulation dust from the rafters over seasonal goods. Everyone below stared upward. Something was walking on the roof.

The sounds multiplied.

One set of heavy steps became two, then three. Whatever had patrolled outside was climbing now. The roof boomed and creaked under their combined weight. Metal popped somewhere over the freezers. One of the women near bakery screamed, “They’re getting in!” and the store dissolved again into pure human motion.

I don’t remember choosing to run. I remember seeing Jake do the opposite. He wandered out into the main aisle, opened his arms wide, and looked up through the hanging signs with tears in his eyes.

“*I’m ready!*” he shouted at the roof. “*Do you hear me? I'm ready!*”

Something above him answered with a howl so deep it felt like being inside a church organ. Ceiling panels rattled. An entire row of hanging fluorescent covers dropped and shattered over the floor.

And then the first claw came through.

It punched down through the corrugated roof near Housewares with a scream of bending metal. Not a paw. A claw. Long, black, hooked at the end, easily the length of my arm. It hooked into the opening and tore sideways. Snow, insulation, and night all came pouring in together.

The creature above began to widen the hole.

We ran.

Chapter 4

[Part I](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/aio8f0/inclement_weather_large_animals_and_other_strange/) and [Part II](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/ajc6rp/inclement_weather_large_animals_and_other_strange/) and [Part III.](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/akcnn9/inclement_weather_large_animals_and_other_strange/)

'

>"*There is no God. There is no Devil. Not here. There's me... and then there's Him.*"

>-Pontius.

Six thirty-five, P.M.

I couldn’t move.

The cold took hold somewhere around the time the roof opened over Housewares. That first claw ripped a jagged mouth in the metal and everything after became fragments: snow pouring into the aisle; shoppers and employees alike sprinting in every direction; the overhead signs swinging violently as something huge shifted on the roof. I remember a second breach near Sporting Goods. Then a third farther back over the loading area where the flood had already claimed half the floor. Every new scream of tearing steel sent another wave of bodies crashing through the warehouse.

We lost people in that chaos. I know that as fact. I just couldn’t tell you how many. Too many faces blurred by motion, darkness, and awful instinct. Maybe they got trampled. Maybe they got taken. Maybe both. Once the animals made it inside, counting people became a luxury we no longer had.

The first creature through the roof landed two aisles over from me. Its shape in my memory still refuses to settle on one proper animal. I keep wanting to call it a cat because of how it moved once it hit the ground, low and fluid and arrogant. But its body was too long and its shoulders too high, and the head looked all wrong, with a jaw that split too far back and front paws nearly the size of manhole covers. The thing shook snow from its hide, looked around at all the screaming people, and selected a target with such casual certainty that it made me feel physically ill.

The target happened to be Jake.

You'd think the old bastard would have run at that point. He didn’t. He actually smiled. He opened his arms wider and tilted his head back like a man greeting sunlight.

“*Finally,*” he said.

The creature took him in one bite. Not chewed. Not mauled. Just scooped him up around the chest and lifted. Jake disappeared into that impossible jaw with both feet still kicking. The sight froze half of us in place. Then the blood came down and everyone started moving again.

I ended up sprinting with a cluster of maybe twenty people toward the tire center because it sat far from the breached roof and still had partial walls. Frank barked orders somewhere behind me. Bill from management kept shouting for everyone to stay together. Neither mattered much. Fear sorted us by speed and luck, nothing more. I still had the hatchet from Hardware and a heavy flashlight clipped through my belt. One of the seasonal stockers carried a flare gun with such reverence that you’d think it was Excalibur.

We reached the tire bays and managed to slam the rolling gate most of the way down before the next wave of people hit. Some got through. Some didn’t. The gate jammed halfway, leaving a gap wide enough to crawl under. Through it we could see the warehouse beyond in brief chunks of fluorescent ruin. Aisles overturned. Shopping carts on their sides. Snow drifting onto polished concrete. Something large moving between the mattresses.

The tire center had maybe thirty of us when things settled enough to breathe. Customers. Employees. One old lady with a bloody eyebrow. Two parents missing their teenage son. Tiffany from Front-End, still white as paper and mumbling about eyes in the water. Everybody talked at once until Frank showed up ducking under the gate and fired his revolver into the ceiling just to shut us all up.

“*Listen to me,*” he shouted. “*We hold here. No one opens that gate unless I say so. No one wanders. If you're hurt, sit down. If you're not hurt, find something you can swing.*”

People listened because he looked like somebody who had finally accepted this day on its own terms. Blood marked one side of his shirt. Not his, as far as I could tell. He had lost the hat. The revolver trembled a little in his fist but his voice did not. In that moment Frank became the closest thing we had to a commander.

The tire center also contained our first miracle. A man who had been quiet up to that point, tall, shaved head, puffy red jacket, stepped forward and said there was another way out. He worked maintenance for a commercial plumbing company and knew the property from prior emergency repairs. There was, according to him, a service tunnel beneath part of the receiving area that connected to drainage infrastructure and eventually popped out near the access road retention basin. The bad news: the hatch to it was behind loading dock three in the flooded section of the warehouse.

Nobody liked that. We liked the alternative less.

Frank decided on a two-part plan. Stay put, conserve bodies, send a smaller team to check the hatch. He picked me, because apparently surviving three separate horrors in one day qualifies you for promotion, along with the plumber guy, Tiffany, Bill, the seasonal stocker with the flare gun, and a forklift operator named Pontius.

Yes, that was his actual name. Or maybe a nickname that had calcified into legal reality. Everybody called him Pontius. Big Dominican dude in his forties, calm in the face of all bullshit, with the exact expression of someone who had expected the world to end stupidly and felt no surprise when it finally did.

We moved out at six ten.

Crossing the warehouse after the first attack felt like walking through the aftermath of a riot in a church. The roof leaked snow and dark water in equal measure. Emergency lighting barely reached the highest shelves. Somewhere far off, metal screeched and something living answered. We kept close to endcaps and overturned pallets, trying not to look too hard at the places where red smears marked the floor. More than once I thought I heard people calling for help deeper in the building. Every time, Pontius shook his head and kept walking.

“*Could be survivors,*” Bill whispered.

Pontius answered without slowing. “*Could be. Could be worse.*”

We passed through Housewares and into the drowned back section. Water reached mid-thigh in places and moved faster than before. Whatever had breached the rear doors had turned the receiving end into a brown indoor river lined by floating boxes of cereal and broken pallets. Tiffany started sobbing quietly the second we stepped in.

“*I don’t want to go back in there,*” she kept saying. “*I don’t want to touch the water again.*”

I didn’t blame her. None of us wanted that.

The maintenance guy found loading dock three by flashlight beam and muscle memory. The hatch sat beneath a metal grate on the raised side platform beside the bay, half submerged and chained shut. We might actually have had a chance, ugly as it looked, if the phones hadn’t started ringing.

Not one phone. All of them.

The abandoned cordless on the manager’s desk in receiving. The smashed display phones floating near Electronics somewhere behind us. The service handset by the loading door. Every receiver in audible range woke up together in a chorus of shrill electronic bells. The sound echoed across the water and concrete so strangely it felt like we were standing inside one giant instrument. Tiffany collapsed to her knees in the flood and screamed.

Then a voice answered from the dark loading bay.

“*Daniel.*”

My mother’s voice.

I froze so hard my teeth clicked. The others heard something too because every single face changed. Bill whispered, “Dad?” under his breath. The maintenance guy spun in a full circle trying to locate the source. Pontius just shut his eyes once like a man disappointed in a prediction coming true.

A second voice rose near dock two. Child's voice. Crying. Then a third from somewhere behind the pallets. Then a fourth. People we missed. People we loved. People we'd left or buried or failed. The warehouse became a whole choir of bait.

“Don't listen,” Pontius said. “*There is no God. There is no Devil. Not here. There's me... and then there's Him.*”

That sentence still rolls around my head at odd hours because of how matter-of-fact he sounded. Like he was identifying coworkers, not cosmic forces.

The water surged. Something huge passed beneath the surface between us and dock three. Not swam. Glided. Slow enough that the ripple preceded it by several seconds. We all backed up instinctively except Tiffany, who just stared down into the churn with huge wet eyes.

“*It’s under us,*” she whispered.

The thing erupted a second later.

The floodwater opened beneath the maintenance guy and threw him upward in a burst of black antlers and slick flesh. For one stupid instant I thought the deer thing had come back. It hadn’t. This one was almost human from the waist up, long pale arms ending in webbed hands, chest stretched thin over visible ribs, head crowned not with antlers exactly but with branching bone that looked grown rather than worn. Its lower half vanished into the water in a mass of eel-like movement impossible to count. The face, if I can call it that, held all the softness of a drowned infant and none of the innocence.

It took the maintenance guy down so fast he never finished screaming.

The flare gun went off point blank into the creature's shoulder. White fire exploded across wet skin. The thing shrieked with a sound like a whole switchboard frying at once and vanished back into the flood in a whirl of black coils. That was enough for us. Hatch plan forgotten. Tunnel forgotten. We ran.

Bill slipped almost immediately. I grabbed one arm. Pontius got the other. Together we half-dragged him through shin-deep and then knee-deep water while the phones behind us kept ringing and our dead kept calling our names from the dark. Once something smooth brushed my calf hard enough to spin me sideways. Tiffany screamed again. The flare gun kid lost the second flare somewhere in the current.

We made it back to the tire center with one fewer man and no useful news except this: the water itself belonged to something.

Frank listened without interrupting. The old lady with the eyebrow wound crossed herself until her fingers cramped. The parents still missing their son asked whether the voices we heard had included a teenage boy. No one answered them. No one had the cruelty required.

Pontius stood by the half-closed gate and looked out into the store for a long while before speaking again.

“*He's herding us,*” he said.

Frank frowned. “Who?”

Pontius nodded toward the dark beyond the aisles. “*The tall one. The one who talks through the phones. The animals are his. The water is his. The voices are his. He wants us moved somewhere.*”

That was the exact moment the fire doors in the back of the tire center unlatched on their own.

The lights died completely.

And somewhere out in the warehouse, very calm and very close, a man’s voice over a phone line said:

“*Thank you for staying open.*”

Chapter 5

[Part I](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/aio8f0/inclement_weather_large_animals_and_other_strange/), [Part II](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/ajc6rp/inclement_weather_large_animals_and_other_strange/), [Part III](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/akcnn9/inclement_weather_large_animals_and_other_strange/) and [Part IV.](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/alp8vw/inclement_weather_large_animals_and_other_strange/)

'

>"*All you need to do is walk into the light.*"

>-Pontius.

I learned a lot about people in the dark that night. How some of us get quiet. How some of us get mean. How some of us, for a little while at least, become more useful than they ever managed in broad daylight under fluorescent lights and routine. It turns out that Costco after power loss contains all the ingredients for a small doomed civilization: bulk food, bottled water, crude tools, too many mouths, and just enough false hope to keep everyone moving one bad decision at a time.

The fire doors in the back of the tire center had opened by themselves. That by itself would have been enough to ruin the mood, but then the power died for real and every remaining emergency light went with it. We got maybe one full second of absolute dark before everybody started screaming. Frank shouted for flashlights. Phones bloomed around the room like little desperate stars. Mine had fifteen percent battery and a spiderweb crack through one corner. It felt suddenly very precious.

The open fire doors revealed a maintenance corridor lit at the far end by a pale industrial glow. Not bright. Just enough to turn the wet cinderblock walls into the color of dead fish. The voice from the warehouse had gone quiet after that one polite little line. The phones stopped too. The silence that followed felt almost courteous.

No one wanted to go near the corridor.

Frank eventually made the call because no one else would. We couldn’t stay where we were. The tire center had too many ways in and not enough sight lines. The front gate only covered one entrance. The water in the warehouse kept rising. Whatever waited out there had already proven it could open doors and peel the roof apart. So the choice, as choices go, was simple: move deeper into the unknown or wait for the known horrors to come get us.

Guess which one the group chose after five full minutes of arguing? Neither. People split immediately.

One faction wanted to stay put and fortify. One wanted to make a run for the front doors, storm or monsters be damned. A third, smaller group hovered around Pontius because he had somehow become our local prophet by virtue of saying terrifying things in a calm voice. The rest just cried or clung to family. It might have stayed that way all night if the scratching hadn’t started on the other side of the tire bay gate.

Something moved outside. Heavy. Slow. Deliberate. We could hear claws or nails or whatever those things had drag across metal in long patient lines. Once. Twice. Then a deep wet huff against the gap under the gate. The whole little civilization made up its mind at once after that.

We went into the corridor.

The passage behind the fire doors sloped down gently beneath the tire center and, according to a sign posted on one wall, eventually joined utility access for refrigeration and storm drainage systems. The air down there smelled less like store and more like concrete and machine heat, which almost counted as reassuring. The pale light came from wall fixtures every twenty feet or so, most flickering on backup battery. We moved in a miserable little procession: Frank with the revolver and a flashlight, then families, then employees carrying what supplies they could grab, then Pontius and me near the back. Tiffany stuck to my shoulder so closely that I could feel her shaking whenever the corridor narrowed.

We passed two locked junction rooms and an electrical closet before the voices came back.

Not from phones this time.

From the vents.

Whispers first, moving with the air. Then clearer words. A woman asking if anyone had seen her son. A little boy crying about the dark. An old man begging for his heart pills. They sounded trapped deeper in the system, not supernatural at all at first, just people in trouble somewhere beyond the walls. That was the genius of it, I guess. Horror doesn’t always have to roar. Sometimes it only has to sound plausible.

Bill fell for it immediately. “There are people down here,” he said. “We have to check.”

Frank didn’t even turn around. “Keep walking.”

The whispers shifted.

Then they found names.

“*Daniel?*” my mother’s voice breathed from a vent overhead.

Tiffany whimpered beside me as somebody behind the grille started using her dead grandmother’s pet name for her. One of the fathers in our group broke ranks completely when a teenage voice ahead shouted “Dad!” from around the bend. He ran. His wife screamed after him. Frank tried to stop him and failed. We heard the man’s footsteps splash through a puddle somewhere up the hall. Then a metal door slammed. Then nothing. His wife folded in on herself and made a sound I never want to hear again.

We kept moving.

Eventually the corridor opened into a larger utility chamber filled with pipes, drainage pumps, and a concrete trough where runoff from somewhere above roared through grates toward the dark. The room also held a surprise that should have cheered us more than it did: a forklift battery station with emergency lamps still running, enough light to actually see one another by. People spread out instantly. Some sat. Some prayed. Some tore open bottled water and cases of protein bars like raccoons. The place felt defensible in the way a bunker in a bad movie feels defensible five minutes before it isn't.

And on the far wall, painted in fading yellow letters, someone had scrawled a message over older safety signage.

WALK INTO THE LIGHT.

The words were old. Not fresh graffiti. Layers of grime had settled into the brushstrokes. That got to me more than anything outside had. It meant somebody had been down there long before us with enough time to become either wise or deranged. Maybe both.

Pontius saw the writing and nodded to himself like a man getting confirmation from an old friend.

“*This is the room,*” he said.

“Room for what?” I asked.

He looked toward the drainage trough. “*Decision.*”

I hated that answer on principle.

While the group caught its breath, Frank and I searched the chamber for exits. One maintenance ladder climbed to a locked hatch. A second tunnel continued past the pumps toward the storm drainage system. That one pulsed with occasional blue-white flashes from somewhere farther ahead. Not electrical sparks. More like reflected lightning with no thunder attached. The light came and went rhythmically, every twenty seconds or so.

When I pointed it out, Pontius smiled for the first time all night.

“*There.*”

Frank shook his head. “No.”

Pontius spread his arms as if presenting a simple math problem. “*You wanted out. There is out.*”

“Through a drainage tunnel lit by God knows what?”

“*Not God.*”

Frank was about one sentence away from pistol-whipping him when the pumps failed.

The room shook once, hard enough to rattle tools off hooks. Then the drainage trough backed up. Water that had been rushing away suddenly burped upward through the grate in a dark, oily swell. People scrambled back from it. The smell came next. River mud. Spoiled meat. A hint of the same fish rot I remembered from the loading flood. Something in the pipe had reversed direction.

Then we saw fingers.

They pushed up through the metal grate from below. Pale. Too many joints. More hands followed, climbing through one after another in impossible numbers as if a pile of drowned people had decided to assemble itself beneath us. The whole group erupted. Frank fired into the grate twice. The bullets rang uselessly off metal. Someone yanked a pallet jack in front of the opening more out of instinct than strategy.

Pontius stepped toward the blue-white flashes.

“*All you need to do is walk into the light,*” he said.

Maybe he was insane. Maybe he was the only one paying attention. Either way, when the first faceless thing pulled itself fully through the grate behind us, most of the room followed him.

The tunnel beyond the pumps narrowed quickly. Water ran ankle-deep through it toward the light. The flashes resolved into something stranger the closer we got: not electricity, not daylight, but a soft lambent glow pulsing around a bend like moonlight forced through frosted glass. The walls here changed too. Concrete gave way in places to old brick, then rough stone. This part of the system predated the store by decades, maybe a century. It felt less built than repurposed.

We moved fast because the things from the grate came after us, dragging and skittering in the dark behind. Every now and then someone would look back and scream. I refused to. The tunnel bent left, then right, and spilled us into a circular chamber with a domed ceiling maybe thirty feet high.

At the center of the room stood a column of light.

There is no good way to describe that without sounding like a lunatic. Imagine a beam from a projector if the projector aimed straight up from beneath the floor and the film were made of milk and stormwater. The light rose from a crack in the stone and spread against the dome in wavering patterns like moonlight seen from underwater. It wasn’t bright enough to blind. It was bright enough to seem wrong. A low humming filled the chamber. Not electrical. Human, almost. As though a thousand people far away were holding one note together.

Everyone stopped.

The fear in the tunnel hit a wall of reverence so suddenly it made me dizzy. Even the children went quiet. The water around the light looked clearer than the flood behind us. Cleaner. People stared into it like they expected answers.

Pontius stepped right up to the beam and held out one hand. The glow licked over his knuckles without burning. He looked back at us with tears on his face.

“*He can’t cross this,*” he said.

“Who?” someone whispered.

“*The tall one.*”

As if summoned by the title, a shape appeared at the far mouth of the tunnel where we had entered. Not rushing. Not skulking. Just there. Tall enough that it had to bow its head slightly beneath the arch. The same pale wrongness from the water and the phones and all the voices, but drawn together now into one more coherent thing. A body like a man’s sketched from memory by an animal. Limbs too long. Face smooth in some places and crowded with features in others, as though several versions had been tried and none fully erased. It wore dark clothing soaked to the skin. One hand rested lightly on the tunnel wall.

And from somewhere inside its chest, a phone rang.

No one moved.

The tall thing looked at the room, at the people gathered around the beam, and tilted its head in what might almost have been amusement.

Then it spoke with a voice made from several voices woven together.

“*I only wanted to shop.*”

Behind me, someone started laughing. High, broken laughter. Shock does weird things. The tall thing took one step into the chamber and the blue-white column flared brighter. Not outward. Upward. The hum deepened. The creature recoiled as if struck, skin along one arm blistering white where the nearest edge of the light touched it. That was enough proof for the room. People surged closer to the beam.

Then the crack in the floor widened.

The whole chamber lurched. Stone split with a sound like a giant inhaling. The light grew stronger, yes, but the ground around it also began to give way into whatever waited below. Water poured into the opening. Someone near the front slipped and nearly went in. Another person dragged them back. Panic returned, wearing a new costume.

Safe light or collapsing floor. Monsters behind, something beneath. Pick your poison.

Pontius looked into the crack and smiled in pure exhausted wonder.

“*It's open,*” he whispered.

That was when the first person jumped.

I still don’t know if it was faith, madness, or simple loss of options. A middle-aged woman from Apparel stepped straight into the beam and vanished downward through the widening gap with her arms folded against her chest as if diving into baptismal water. No scream. No impact. Just gone.

The room lost its mind after that.

Chapter 6

>”*Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which perceived him: and all kindreds of the Earth shall wail because of him. Even so, Amen.*”

[Part I](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/aio8f0/inclement_weather_large_animals_and_other_strange/), [part II](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/ajc6rp/inclement_weather_large_animals_and_other_strange/), [part III](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/akcnn9/inclement_weather_large_animals_and_other_strange/), [part IV](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/alp8vw/inclement_weather_large_animals_and_other_strange/), and [part V.](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/am76to/inclement_weather_large_animals_and_other_strange/)

I don't know how many hours have passed. I don't know how many people made it out of Costco. I don't know how many of the ones who jumped into the light survived whatever came next. I only know this: if you ever find yourself trapped in a store in New Jersey while the weather goes wrong and the phones begin to ring, you do not answer them.

The chamber split into two kinds of people the moment that first woman vanished into the light. The believers and the horrified. Pontius, naturally, became king of the first group. A few folks fell to their knees. Some cried. Some laughed. Others backed hard against the wall and stared at the widening crack in the floor like it had opened into hell. I probably belonged with the second camp, but by then panic and exhaustion had scrambled my instincts beyond easy labels.

The tall one remained at the tunnel mouth watching us. Every few seconds the chest-phone inside it rang and a different voice leaked from its throat in little broken bursts. Child crying. Old man praying. Somebody begging for help in Spanish. It did not seem bothered by the chaos so much as interested in how we would sort ourselves. The light kept it at the edges, but only barely. Each flare from the column blistered more of its visible skin. It learned the boundaries quickly and stopped pressing them.

People kept jumping.

That sounds impossible even to me now. But imagine the day we had already endured. Imagine giant animals in the snow, faceless things in the water, dead relatives speaking from vents, and a room full of other people all searching your face for some sign that you know what to do. Then imagine one strange beam of light that hurts the monster and swallows volunteers without a scream. It doesn’t take a cult leader to turn that into hope. It only takes Pontius quietly saying, “*Better than staying here.*”

A father with his daughter went next. Then the old woman from the tire center, clutching her cross necklace so hard it left marks in her palm. Every time someone stepped into the glow, the column shimmered, widened for a second, and took them down into the crack beneath. No blood. No impact. Just gone.

Tiffany looked at me and said, “Do you think it’s Heaven?”

I was too tired to lie convincingly. “No.”

“Do you think it’s safer than here?”

That question I couldn’t answer.

Frank made the decision for a lot of us by trying the other route. While the jumpers focused on the beam and the tall thing hovered in the tunnel, he took a handful of people along the outer wall looking for another exit. They found one behind a collapsed section of masonry, a narrow service passage angling upward. We didn’t get to learn where it led. Something huge hit the far side of the blockage the second they started clearing it. Claws punched through the old brick. One of the parents from the tire center got dragged screaming into the opening before Frank could fire a shot. The rest of them staggered back toward the main chamber covered in dust and blood.

No easy exits left. Only the light.

The tall thing finally spoke again, this time in a voice that sounded almost kindly.

“*You don't have to choose yet. I can wait.*”

Then, because cruelty loves detail, it used Marcus’ voice.

“*Danny, it hurt the whole time.*”

I broke a shelf display on its head with my flashlight.

Or I tried to. I screamed and charged the tunnel like a complete idiot. Frank later told me I got farther than anyone else that night. I only remember the thing turning toward me with mild surprise and then lifting one arm. The air changed. That’s the only way I can say it. Pressure hit first, like dropping underwater. Then every sound in the chamber got pulled sideways. My ears filled with dead static and a thousand overlapping voices. I saw my mother in the tunnel. Then Rachel. Then Marcus missing half his face. Then a younger version of myself standing in Costco with a sample cup. The world broke into channels and the thing simply selected the one that hurt most.

Frank tackled me out of the tunnel mouth before I could reach it. His revolver went off somewhere near my head. The tall one recoiled one step, less from the bullet than from the light column surging up behind us. Frank dragged me by the collar all the way back to the beam while I coughed and cried and swore like a child.

“Stay in the damn light,” he hissed.

That was when the roof of the chamber started to rain snow.

The storm above had found us. Or maybe the store had finally collapsed enough to open a path. Either way, wind began to howl down the tunnels and black water poured in from at least two new cracks in the wall. The light flickered once, went thin, then widened in a sudden blinding pulse that lit the entire dome. For a heartbeat I could see the whole place clearly.

There had once been a church here.

Not metaphorically. Literally. Rows of submerged pews half-swallowed by stone and mineral growth. Broken hymn boards on the walls. An old altar toppled beneath layers of concrete and later construction. Costco, the drains, the chamber — all of it had been built over some much older place of worship. The crack in the floor ran straight through what must once have been the center aisle. And around the edges of the dome, nearly invisible until the flare exposed them, dozens of old telephone lines descended from higher up through drilled holes and merged into the light itself like black roots.

The tall one hated that flare. It shielded its ruined face and snarled with a voice made of switchboards and sermons. The animals outside must have felt it too, because the tunnels all around us erupted with answering cries. Scratching echoed from every direction. Whatever truce the chamber had offered was ending.

People started jumping faster. No order. No prayer. Just fear and momentum. One after another they stepped into the column and vanished below. Pontius stood beside the beam guiding them with the patience of a nightclub bouncer.

“*Feet first if you can. Don't fight it. Walk into the light.*”

At some point his calm stopped feeling insane and started feeling useful.

Tiffany grabbed my arm. “If we stay, we die.”

Frank overheard and said, “Maybe.”

“Maybe?” she shouted.

He looked older than any man should in that moment. Blood ran down one sleeve. His revolver held one round if I heard the count right. “I don’t know what’s down there,” he said. “But I know what’s up here.”

The decision should have been easy. It wasn’t. A lifetime of every religious warning about false light and easy miracles fought with every survival instinct screaming that the monster in the tunnel had already made its claim. I looked at the beam. I looked at the tall one. I looked at the remaining people crowded around the crack.

Then the ceiling opened.

Not fully. Just enough for one of the roof-creatures from the store to force itself down through the stone and metal above us in a shower of debris. A black paw the size of a couch punched through first, followed by a catlike head slick with snow and dark water. It landed on the edge of the chamber and sent half the room sprawling. Frank fired his last round into one eye. The thing barely noticed.

Pontius smiled at it, then stepped backward into the beam and disappeared without another word.

That ended the argument for me.

Tiffany went first. She squeezed my hand so hard our knuckles cracked, whispered, “Tell my mom I tried,” and stepped into the light. Gone. Frank shoved the old lady with the cross in after her. Gone. He turned to me and said, “You writing all this down later?”

I nodded because I think he needed me to.

“Good,” he said. “Then go.”

I didn’t. Not yet. I looked at him, at the chamber, at the tunnel where the tall one waited just outside the brightest edge of the light. The thing used my own voice then, softly, perfectly.

“*You can stay if you want to see what happens next.*”

I wish I could claim bravery for what followed. It was not bravery. It was revulsion. I took one step backward into the beam and let gravity decide the rest.

Falling through the light felt less like dropping and more like being turned inside out. Every cold part of the day vanished at once. Every voice hit me in a single impossible note. For one second I saw all of Costco from above, not just the building but the whole flooded lot, the tree line, the road, the giant animals circling, the storm twisting down over Bayonne like a lid. I saw the telephone lines under the ground threading through church ruins and drainage culverts and old neighborhoods all the way out toward the marsh. And I saw the tall one standing at every intersection at once, listening.

Then I hit mud.

Morning light. Real morning. Gray and weak and beautiful. I lay in a retention basin behind the store with water up to my chest and snow melting in my hair. The storm had passed. Sirens finally filled the distance. Around me, scattered across the basin and the reeds beyond, lay maybe a dozen other survivors coughing and vomiting and staring at the sky like people newly born. Tiffany was there. The old lady too. A couple of customers I recognized. No Pontius. No Frank.

The Costco behind us looked half collapsed.

Officials called it a weather catastrophe. Structural failure. Flash flooding. Animal aggression worsened by panic and poor visibility. They can call it whatever helps them sleep. News crews showed the parking lot and the ruined roof but not the tunnel mouths. Not the old stone under the foundation. Not the dead things they dredged out of the basin that looked almost human from a distance and less so the closer you got.

Marcus was never found. Jake wasn’t either, unless you count a fragment of apron and one blue glove.

Frank remains missing. Officially. Unofficially, I think he stayed behind because some people are built for holding doors shut while everyone else runs.

As for Pontius, I don’t know if he died, ascended, escaped, or simply got exactly what he wanted. Sometimes I think I hear his laugh when wind moves through loading docks.

I’m posting this because the authorities will not tell the whole truth and because I made one final discovery that matters. Yesterday, while trying to replace everything I lost, I went to a mall electronics store and picked up a cheap prepaid phone. I powered it on in the parking lot. Before I even inserted the SIM, before it should have connected to anything, the screen lit up with one missed call.

No number. No voicemail. Just a location tag under the timestamp.

*Bayonne Costco.*

If the weather turns ugly and the phones start acting strange, don't go shopping. And if you see a light opening where no light should be, pray you get to choose before something else chooses for you.